Advertisers Jump on Coronavirus Bandwagon
As public health organizations scramble to educate the public, social media enables businesses, politicians, and online entrepreneurs to adapt the coronavirus story to suit their own ends. Facebook Ads Library gives us a peek into the alternative narratives around coronavirus.
On February 20, here at ISI Foundation we collected ads having “coronavirus” or “covid” across the countries for which Facebook releases data, and right away it was obvious United States is at the forefront of advertising on the topic, with ads as early as mid-January appearing on the platform.
Who is advertising around coronavirus? In the United States, we found 359 ads from 78 distinct Facebook Pages that we could roughly group into public health (6%), non-profit (16%), news (26%), political (26%), business (12%), and personal (5%), with the rest of categories accounting for 9% of the advertisers. As Facebook Ads Library is not meant for transparency around ads concerning public health, but for “politics” and “social issues”, we focus on the ads that are alternative to public health.
To understand the similarity of the messaging of these pages, we calculate how similar the text of their ads is to each other, looking at number of words they have in common (Jaccard similarity). We can then plot them as a network, so that a link between two pages means that their ad text is similar at a threshold of 0.05. We find clusters of non-profit and public health pages (green, in the figure below), business pages (yellow), and an intertwined mass of news and politics pages (blue and red). As most news Pages were highly political, it made sense that they were clustered together. Other Pages had a unique message, such as United Poultry Concerns, who advertised around treatment of animals, so they remain unattached to the others. We replace the names of Pages we identified as personal for the posters’ privacy.
Who is being targeted? Along with the ad text, Facebook Ads Library provides information on the demographics of the viewership of each ad in terms of age group and gender, and US state. Interestingly, the ads seemed to be highly targeted geographically, with most viewers coming from California, New York, and Texas, among other few states. We don’t know whether this is due to targeting of the advertisers or due to some internal Facebook viewership allocation, but we notice that it is usually older female users who are reached (note it is older people who are most likely to have complications from COVID-19).
Considering impressions received, we find American Medical Association (AMA) to be the biggest spender, followed by the page supporting Mike Bloomberg for US Presidency (“Team Mike 2020”), followed by Melinda Gates. If Facebook were to include more ads from public health, we may be able to see whether some business or political interest outspend public health messaging, potentially competing for the same audience.
How is the coronavirus used in political messaging? We find the virus to be used by all sides of the US political debate. For example, it has been mentioned both in support and in opposition of US President Donald Trump:
The Democratic contenders participating in the Primaries have also been mentioned, including Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Michael Bloomberg (the latter of which has a Facebook Page by far outspending the others, within our dataset).
Is there possible misinformation? Reading through the ads, we notice several sources of questionable material. For instance, the ad below is posted by a Page that was created on Feb 6, 2020, possibly specifically to post on the topic of coronavirus:
More mainstream ideas can also be found, such as claims that coronavirus originated from a Chinese “biowarfare unit” (which research lab as been denying), as well as some ridicule of US President Donald Trump’s statement that “as the weather starts to warm and the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone” (which may have some grounding in existing seasonal flu research, but is impossible to verify this early in time). Yet others cautioned against creating vaccines too quickly while ignoring dangerous side effects (linking swine flu vaccines to Guillain–Barré syndrome, though this link has been considered too tenuous to advise against vaccination). Finally, we found a new Page (created on January 30) advertising face masks, claiming they are “Anti-Virus Masks”, though no credentials or description of the business and its origins are given.
Although concerning, all of these ads had a low budget (reaching no more than 199 USD), and possibly did not reach many viewers. However, it is not clear what vetting procedures they had to go through to be posted on the platform.
Conclusions.
- On social media, numerous parties are competing with public health messaging, potentially outspending them in viewership bidding war
- Lack of vetting may result in misinformation or speculative information being promoted on the platform
- Using the epidemic to emphasize political divisions instead of uniting the public may put additional stress on the public and response efforts
- Narrow ad targeting may mean the advertising will not reach US population evenly, introducing potential disagreement among the population on how to deal with the crisis
For more on this research by Yelena Mejova and Kyriaki Kalimeri, see our preprint here.
